Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion. The housing crisis is a failure of the market, the State, this Government and previous Governments. We see that failure everywhere when it comes to dealing with the housing crisis. Often when we have debates about the housing crisis, the Government likes to say that those of us in opposition and the left are approaching this from a very ideological viewpoint, that this is why we are giving out about money being given to developers and that the Government is the pragmatist. Certainly People Before Profit is ideological. We do not hide that. Our ideology is in our name; we put people before profit. We take a socialist approach to the housing crisis, which means people's right to a home should come before the right of developers, bankers and landlords to profit. The Government likes to deny it has an ideology when its own ideology is very clearly a major part of the problem because, against all the evidence of all the actions it has tried, the Government is committed that the way to solve the housing crisis is to incentivise private developers to build homes. It is the idea that if private developers are incentivised enough, eventually somehow it will work and the housing crisis will be resolved. Of course, that ideology has the very happy coincidence of also serving the material interests of the developers in this country, who were the ones receiving the public money. The points around bridging the construction viability gap and doling out huge amounts of public money to developers really underline that point.

The Government already had the help-to-buy scheme, which was fundamentally a help-to-profit scheme for developers. It was about funnelling money through the hands of first-time buyers into the hands of developers and increasing property prices to incentivise the developers to keep building. Looking at the origin of the help-to-buy scheme, that was explicit in terms of the lobbying from the Construction Industry Federation. However, the Government is now bypassing the middle man. It is not even bothering to put money momentarily into the hands of the first-time buyer before it goes to the developer.

The Government is just going to give the money directly to the developers. It is going to give developers €120,000 per apartment to bridge the construction viability gap. The point was well made by Deputy O'Callaghan that it will also include profit for the developer. To add insult to injury, we can forget about the €120,000 cap when it comes to regional cities because the Government will go up to €144,000. The handout will not be used to lower the price of the apartments. It will not come with any conditions. It is merely a massive handout to the already very wealthy. This is nothing new for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. When many of the same developers crashed the economy and ended up in NAMA, they got salaries of close to €200,000 a year to continue to operate. These are the corporate welfare cheats who cheat us all. Instead of throwing more public money at them, we should use public money for direct, State-led construction of genuinely affordable and social housing, providing quality employment, apprenticeships for workers and so on.

Another example of this approach, incentivising developers and using lots of public money to do so, is the local infrastructure housing activation fund, LIHAF. We have seen €200 million of public money spent through LIHAF building roads and infrastructure for private developers to help them to profit. Originally the promise was that 40% of homes built on LIHAF-funded land would have to be affordable but very quickly the Government backed away from that and said there would be some unstated "haircut" for profits on these sites. In Cherrywood we have seen massive amounts of funding spent but we have heard nothing about what level of affordable housing will be provided and how genuinely affordable it will be.

This gets to the core of the problem with the Government's approach to and plan for affordable housing. It is like Humpty Dumpty, who said "When I use a word... it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less". The Government uses the word "affordable" and just says that this is affordable housing, even though by any ordinary person's standards, it is simply not affordable. The idea is that €450,000 is an affordable price for a house in Dublin. The Government cannot just say it, slap the label "affordable" on it and then, all of a sudden, people will be able to afford it; they still cannot afford it, no matter what the Government calls it. The whole problem, again, comes back to the ideology of the market. How does the Government determine affordability? Affordability is simply a percentage of market value. Affordability means a knockdown, a 10% or 20% reduction from the market value but when the market value is so completely out of control, with homes that are completely unattainable for ordinary middle-income earners, then a small reduction still leaves them absolutely unaffordable. Affordability should be defined in the language of ordinary people and refer to something that ordinary workers could actually afford. We should stop pinning affordability to the market and instead connect it to average incomes. No workers should have to pay more than 25% of their income for a roof over their heads.

I would also make the point that where we have affordable housing and the State is investing public money to develop affordable housing, which we support, we must make sure those homes do not end up in the hands of vulture funds or corporate landlords further down the line. We know that there are corporate investors looking to profit from the State's spending on housing. This is why we argue that all affordable housing purchase schemes must include strong clauses to ensure the units can only be sold back to the local authority so that they remain affordable through generations. In effect, this is another model of public housing provision.

In terms of the numbers of affordable units being built, the figures are pitiful with less than 50 affordable homes in some of the key commuter towns around Dublin, and only eight per year in Carlow and Laois. It is window dressing from the Government; it is fiddling while Rome burns. Dr. Rory Hearne has described the figures as "pathetic" and he is completely correct. It seems that only 16 homes have been built under the current local authority affordable purchase scheme. Over 300 families have applied for those 16 homes, with the gap between the crisis and the Government's actions summed up in these figures.

Fundamentally, what it all comes down to is the continued reliance on the market and catering to developers' needs rather than the needs of the people. The Minister's plan is failing and will continue to fail because it does not address the core issues behind the crisis, namely the over-reliance on the market to deliver a basic necessity as well as the acceptance of further commodification of what is an essential need. The Government's housing policy is built on a fundamental, ideological fallacy that if we incentivise developers, financiers and builders enough, they will eventually deliver what people need. The Dáil has changed laws to encourage corporate landlords into the system. We have abandoned any attempt to control or limit evictions. The Government has eulogised private property rights over the right to housing. The Construction Industry Federation, CIF, seems to have the ear of every housing Minister, with the Minister on speed dial, taking the federation's proposals and putting them into law. The Government has changed the law, the building regulations and the apartment specifications. It has even decided to fund and grant access to finance based on whatever these vested interests want. Whatever they want, the Government bends over backwards for them in the hope that ultimately, they will deliver. We have the utterly farcical situation whereby the corporate lobbyists, in the form of the CIF, have been put in charge of keeping a register to ensure proper standards in the building industry. So enmeshed is our housing and urban planning policy with the needs of those vested interests that the Government seems to get confused.

It was once said that what is good for General Motors is good for the USA. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael seem to believe that what is good for the CIF, corporate landlords and developers is good for ordinary people in Ireland but the truth is that it is not. The truth is that they have diametrically opposed class interests. They benefit when the prices rise and ordinary people suffer. Every failed target, every jump in homeless figures, every eviction and every hike in rents proves that what is good for the vested interests is most definitely not good for ordinary people in this country.

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